The night my iPad attacked

The moo cow Tabcoosh.
The other night, around 10pm, my iPad nearly broke my nose. I was lying in bed watching a Cherry Healey doco about freegans on ABC iView (taking a break from my pilgrimage through the five existing Game of Thrones books, but that’s another blog post). The iPad was sitting on its folded over cover on my chest … until it fell forward and whacked me on the nose.

It’s fallen before, but usually I’ve managed to catch it, or it’s landed gently. On this occasion, I was genuinely concerned for the integrity of my bone structure. I checked to see whether there was any bleeding (none, and bones were intact, phew), then decided it was high time I joined my toddler son as the owner of a Tabcoosh.
Our little boy has been an iPad user since they arrived in Australia in May 2010. He was 10 months old, and started with counting and alphabet apps. These days it’s ABC4Kids on iView ahead of TV on the big screen every time. Story time each night is a combination of three or four printed books (his current favourite is Claude and the Big Surprise) and more interactive apps like Animalia (he loves trying to find Graeme) and anything from Nosy Crow (current favourite is Bizzy Bear).

Originally, the whole family shared (and fought over) one iPad. When the second generation arrived, I scored a white model and the other two continued to fight over the original. Then my husband’s workplace presented him with one, and we became a three iPad family. Which meant our little boy had his very own iPad to spill juice on or drop on the kitchen floor. I feared for the safety of iPad Mark I, and watched in sympathy as he struggled to make it sit up against a cushion for easy viewing on the sofa, or bent his neck down to watch it as it sat flat on the coffee table.

Enter the Tabcoosh. We have the moo cow model, which reminds me of a very groovy fridge I once had that was painted in the same design. I wonder what happened to that fridge.

Our boy’s iPad lives permanently in the Tabcoosh. He carries it from room to room, onto beds and sofas and tables, sits it on his lap on long car trips and on the coffee table for easy viewing. He engages with stories, watches videos, does drawings, practises his numbers and letters and plays games anywhere and everywhere.

We plug it in to charge while still in the Tabcoosh, and find that spilled drinks now soak through the Tabcoosh itself, while the iPad remains clean and dry.

So, in the interest of protecting my nose, it’s time for me to invest in a Tabcoosh for myself. I’m thinking the humbug stripe, and recommend the accessory highly to all iPad users.

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Charlotte Harper

Charlotte Harper is a Canberra journalist, blogger, editor and publisher who has worked in newspapers, magazines, books and online. She runs digital-first non-fiction publisher Editia and covered book industry developments at ebookish.com.au before joining Booku.com. A former literary editor of The South China Morning Post, Charlotte has also written about books and technology for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Canberra Times. She once edited a mobile phone and gadget magazine, and is a published author, of a book about digital publishing – Weird Wild Web (Penguin Australia 1999).
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Oh, I don’t know, you probably have a few more shared viewing experiences and even actual live conversations than we do! I do worry about how much time we all spend in front of screens, my son particularly. We hide the thing away during the day so that we can interact with each other and get out into the fresh air. It’s banned it from the dinner table too. But very handy for those times when you can’t be there to interact because there is dinner to cook etc.

Oh, I don’t know, you probably have a few more shared viewing experiences and even actual live conversations than we do! I do worry about how much time we all spend in front of screens, my son particularly. We hide the thing away during the day so that we can interact with each other and get out into the fresh air. It’s banned it from the dinner table too. But very handy for those times when you can’t be there to interact because there is dinner to cook etc.